I stopped by George's office today. He's pretty amused by the whole thing. He confirms that either it's a different George Leussis, or, more likely, it's a total fabrication. Our George is a hardware guy on the Chandra ground operations data team and doesn't have the described expertise, and has never heard of the individual described in the story or (until all his friends started emailing him this weekend) the dubious lump of green stuff. He doesn't know of any other George Leussis associated with NASA. While it is just barely possible that there is another George Leussis at NASA, and that such a piece of vitreous material might have a composition that could let t be identified as space debris, I think it is more likely that the story is a complete fabrication, perhaps based on the true story of the piece of Sputnik 4 debris which hit the main street of a small town in Wisconsin in 1962 and was analysed by SAO mineralogist Ursula Marvin, who confirmed both its Russian composition and the fact that it showed reentry heating effects. Ursula is retired now but I remember she had a cast of this lump of Vostok-prototype on her desk. - Jonathan On 16 June 2013 13:32, Allen Thomson <thomsona@flash.net> wrote: > > > NASA Analysis Engineer George Leussis > > Who apparently works, or worked, at the SAO on Chandra support. Should be > easy enough to find and ask about this. Jonathan? > _______________________________________________ > Seesat-l mailing list > http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/private/seesat-l/attachments/20130618/8da3846a/attachment.html _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l
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